Pages

Sunday, December 15, 2013

Advent 2: Lobsters in the desert

12/8

It’s the second Sunday in Advent.
I begin by playing a recordingof Lo How
a Rose e’er Blooming.(Es is ein ros)Talk about how the old German song was the framingdevice for Bread and Puppet’s Shatterer…This
week as we light our candles, we singtwo verses of Barbara Lundblad’s newversion of O Come O come, emmanuel…

O come, o come Immanuel

And bless each place your
people dwell

Melt ev’ry weapon crafted
for war

Bring peace upon the earth
for evermore

Rejoice, rejoice! Take heart
and do not fear,

God’s chosen one, Immanuel,
draws near.

O come green shoot of Jesse,
free

Your people from despair and
apathy

Forge justice for the poor
and meek

Grant safety for the young
ones and the weak.

Rejoice, rejoice! Take heart
and do not fear,

God’s chosen one, Immanuel,
draws near.

And the theme for this week is hope….

Our first scripture is ISAIAH 11:1-10. We reflect on what’s being said.
That the stump is like a cut off tree. A tree taken for dead. And a sprig of
new life is bursting forth. (Like breaking through the concrete) I also pass around a copy of oneof Jonathan Hicks’ Peaceable Kingdom paintings. Remembering my cousin’s Pennsylvania
Quaker meeting house with several of these. How I love the big, dumb, simple
animals living in harmony. And beyond the Isaiahan vision imagery, in a
Pennsylvania landscape, William Penn and friends meeting with Native Americans.
I always wished I could enter into one of those paintings. A world to live in.
Or into.

The Peaceable Kingdom

(Although one of our members was particularly attracted to …with the breath of his lips he shall kill
the wicked….5)

For me, it’s..They
will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain 8 and that it is a
universal vision not just fora
particular people.

Romans picks up the theme of hope: 13May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in
believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. And we talk about how hope is notoptimism. Optimism is believing that
every day in every way everything is getting better and better. On the other
hand, Hope, as Jim Wallis has said, is believing in spite of the evidence and having the courage to work to
make the evidence change.

And
so, as it is his week, we end with MATTHEW
3:1-12 and John the Baptist. That child of privilege, who left the tall steeple
if the temple and his establishment family forthe wilderness. And that what it was about, the baptizing, was a radical
critique of the state of the religious establishment that had gone in to
collaboration with the occupying colonial power. That even the temple’s
purifying baths, built by Herod were modeled on Roman baths. So the only appropriate
action was the act of conversion, re-conversion, by entering into the ever flowingwaters of the Jordan.

His clothingand
dress like an Elijah. And his diet, locusts and wild honey, the simplest.
(Although as Arcadia and John R pointed out, the Spanish reads langostas, IE,
lobsters…lobsters and wild honey. And we realize that lobsters and locusts are
equally non-kosher.)

And that repentance means turning around, going ina different direction.

So why does he attack the scribes and pharisees?

You brood of vipers! Who warned you to
flee from the wrath to come? 8Bear fruit worthy of repentance

Is
that any way to build a congregation? Is he questioning why they are there? Are
they sincere? Or on a reconnaissance mission out to gather evidence? Like when Homeland Security told me that they had
intel embedded in West-Park’s Occupy contingent?

He is
clear that being children of Abraham is nothing to be proud of. (like those who say..I’m proud to
be a real American…) and that

God is able from these stones to raise up
children to Abraham.

And then he gets seriously radical:

Even now the ax is lying at the
root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut
down and thrown into the fire.

11“I baptize you with water for repentance,
but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to
carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. 12His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his
threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he
will burn with unquenchable fire.

John’s expectation of the messiah is
clear: It’s easy to see ourselves as the wheat and we know exactly who the
chaff are and that they are about to get their just deserts. It’s the French
Revolution. Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth. The Chinese Cultural
Revolution.

But here is the truth: we all have wheat and
chaff within us. The purpose of this season, this preparation is to find the
chaff within ourselves and offer it up. Repentance. Turning around. Dealing
with our own chaff.